A cardboard box sits open atop a second, larger box. It looks empty and it is, sort of – the contents aren't physically inside the space, but are instead displayed on a screen that sits at the bottom of the box.
Images of personal artifacts loop like a roll call down a roster of objects that someone has deemed worth saving. Their groupings allude to their significance as either key players in a narrative, or residue of lifecycle events.
This archival methodology is a little humorous and a little sad. It suggests that enhancing a cardboard box with technology is a rewarding way to increase its storage capacity. However, the trade-off is that the objects inside can only exist as digital data.
Is what's lost in translation – the smell, feel, and weight of our cherished things in our hands – worth the ability to freeze their appearance in time? Do we care whether our personal affects survive only as photographic shades of their former selves?
Technology severs the tie between object and owner: the screen acts a barrier between physical and digital worlds. This dematerialization, although detrimental to the human/object relationship, symbolically frees the objects from their phenomenologically-transparent state of being. By exiling them to a digital dimension, their utility as mere vessels for human memories is hampered just enough to suggest their ability for autonomous existence.
inventori is a series of artworks that re-imagine a home inventory record as a more poetic and provocative type of archive. These hybrids of personal artifacts and technology challenge humans to rethink their relationships with and philosophical understanding of objects. What's a home inventory record?
Objects are unique signifiers of human experiences. Collections of artifacts allude to stories that are greater than the sum of their parts. What is lost when these collections are archived digitally? View this piece ›
How far will we go to maintain a connection to our archived objects? When our cherished things are packed away, our separation anxiety can be treated with an absurd coping mechanism: a closed-circuit television feed of the inside of the storage box. View this piece ›
Two toys are caught in a loop of mutual surveillance. Their technological prosthetics give them a literal point of view. With this, the objects themselves become the archival mechanism. View this piece ›
